When the DPS tools have been installed into InDesign they should turn off/gray out any features that cannot be used with DPS (with the option of turning them back on again if you are not outputting to a folio). Recently I have had to explain to a young designer that the animation that he has created will not work within DPS despite the fact that the Animation panel appears to be “open for business”.

For example:

In the Hyperlinks panel “Shared Hyperlink Destination” is checked (On) by default. If you don’t turn it off before creating links then copying text with links to the other orientation will mean those links fail! How is a user supposed to know this?

This is ridiculous and yet another example of how clumsily DPS has been bolted on to InDesign. I have been using this software for almost a year and many of the stability issues (many identified in the prerelease) still have not been addressed by Adobe, let alone feature requests that we constantly hear are on the road map.

The interface of ADPS is clumsily finding its way through a swamp of former Flash panels. You can't blame Adobe for not having revamped their InDesign CS5 flagship immediately and completely just because Apple dumped Flash, at the time of the release of CS5 (what a timing...)

But Adobe could have made things a bit easier, i.e. by offering an update or addition to the Workspaces, or add some asterisks behind the interactive features and options that just won't work with ADPS. How many interface designers does it take to implement such small tweaks ? My guess is that not even a single developer needs to be involved in that.

Below, the image of my Workspace with a colored overlay, which I always show to my course attendees and presentation audiences. It clarifies a lot of what's going on. Green: special panel for ADPS features and options; Yellow: some things work with ADPS, some don't; Red: just forget about it...